The incredible similarities between certain models of Medeli keyboards and certain models from other brands— such as Kurzweil and Roland (or Korg?)— has already been noted in other threads. The outer casings, the dedicated LCD screens, the song recording features, and even the Voice lists and Style lists appear to be identical or nearly so, with the brand names and model names printed on the casings being the only obvious differences between them!
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all the “same” keyboard, just branded differently for marketing purposes. For example, the advertising for the Kurzweil models mentions that they use Kurzweil’s acoustic piano samples, and presumably the other companies’ models don’t use Kurzweil’s samples. But the similarities that can be seen by comparing pictures of the keyboards as well as the information in their manuals are pretty astonishing.
To my mind, the three main questions that this raises seem to be as follows:
(1) How deeply do these similarities go? Are they so deep that these could indeed be said to be the “same” keyboard except with different brand names for marketing purposes? I would hope not, and that would seem to imply that the manufacturer who’s producing these keyboards for Medeli, Kurzweil, Roland, and other keyboard brands is actually the owner of those brands, or that some other company owns the manufacturers as well. While that sort of thing isn’t unheard of in the business world— big companies buy small companies all the time— I don’t think it’s the only possible explanation.
(2) If these are actually different keyboards that are manufactured from the same parts, is it right or wrong? To me, it doesn’t seem much different from different brands of automobiles which use parts that are manufactured by the same parts suppliers— or different brands of refrigerators, televisions, cell phones, etc. It would be nice if every individual company either manufactured their own parts, or had exclusive contracts with the companies that supply them with parts, but that’s unrealistic. The real question here is, how much “additional value” or “uniqueness” is being contributed by the companies whose brand names are on the end products? If you and I go shopping at the same grocery store and buy the exact same items— same brand and size of eggs, same brand and type of milk, same brand and type of flour, etc.— and then we each bake a cake, have we baked the “same” cake? Even if we followed the same recipe, we might vary it in different ways according to our personal knowledge and experience— add a little bit more or a little bit less of a certain ingredient than the recipe calls for, or add a pinch of a certain spice that isn’t in the recipe, or bake it at a slightly different temperature or for a slightly different amount of time, etc. Any cook who has asked another cook for the recipe to a dish knows that even if you follow the recipe to the letter, the outcome can be different than what you were hoping to duplicate. So as far as “right or wrong,” if the issue is whether or not the consumer is being fooled into spending different amounts of money or becoming loyal to a specific brand when in fact it is all really “the same product,” I would say that it’s okay, that the consumer is not (necessarily) being fooled somehow, that the products are (hopefully) different.
(3) Finally, are the parts manufacturers doing something underhanded? For example, if they had been contracted by Roland, or Yamaha, or other large corporations to produce specific parts according to specific company-owned designs, proprietary information, etc., is it possible that they’ve offered to supply other companies with those same parts? Judging by the lawsuits that have been filed between Apple and other companies (just to give an example), I’d say that yes, this is a real possibility— which is not necessarily saying that it’s actually the case.
